Apr 4 Many of Your Favorite Songs are Just Elaborate Samples and it Will Bug the Hell Out of You

I recently found an incredible site called WhoSampled.com. The site sifts through every song imaginable and reveals and explores parts of these songs that were inspired or directly sampled from another. It is like the Human Genome Project for music. By browsing through this website, I realized just how endemic the use of sampling is in modern music, rap especially. The catchiest parts of many of my favorite songs, it turns out, were not actually written by the assumed artist or even for them initially.

On one hand, I respect the genius of the producer or rapper that was able to find an obscure part of an old jazz song that no one had ever heard of and use it as the baseline for a worldwide hit. No matter how you look at it, this is no easy feat. On the other hand though, I feel like maybe I was giving credit to the wrong people this entire time.